On the Road

Published in 1957, On the Road was a landmark event in American fiction, a countercultural credo that made Jack Kerouac the reluctant figurehead of a generation that saw itself in his cast of restless seekers, "mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time." Kerouac evoked the exuberant, anguished questing of his protagonists Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty—versions of himself and his friend Neal Cassady—in the jazzlike riffs of his prose. Alternately hailed and reviled in its day, the book has become an American classic, ranked by the Modern Library among the 100 best 20th-century novels in English.

"Its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion.... There are sections of On the Road in which the writing is of a beauty almost breathtaking.... There is some writing on jazz that has never been equaled in American fiction, either for insight, style, or technical virtuosity."—NYTimes